If you think North Carolina's mental health system is complicated, hard to understand, a web of hundreds of institutions, legislative committees, special studies, funding sources, arcane medical definitions, and legal language - you're right.

If you think that means that it's just too difficult to tackle, that citizens and advocates and progressives should not worry about the mental health system and concentrate on issues that are simpler, then you're wrong, dead wrong. Here are a few reasons why.

James David Rich was eleven years old when he walked into his 5th grade classroom with a loaded shotgun, looked at his classmates, turned the gun toward his stomach, and pulled the trigger. It was the most shocking incident of Rich's troubled life, but not the last one. Rich was in and out of hospitals and juvenile detention facilities and group homes. He was on and off medication and diagnosed with a variety of disorders.

The system finally took decisive action, too late.

Rich was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to life in prison in 1991. His mental health problems continued. He was sentenced to death in 1994 for killing a fellow inmate. He dropped his court appeals and asked the State of North Carolina to execute him, to help him commit suicide. The State, which had failed James David Rich his whole life, complied. He was killed in Central Prison March 26, 1999. Three lives lost to mental illness.

The vast majority of the men and women on North Carolina's Death Row are mentally ill, and only when their execution date approaches do we learn which of the many holes in the mental health system's safety net they tumbled through.

But it's not just prisoners and their victims that we sacrifice because we allow our mental health system to languish in the tangled web of politics and the shifting winds of blame and ignorance. It is literally hundreds of thousands of individual lives in North Carolina that we risk.

The news media reports almost weekly the devastating effects of a system that is dramatically broken.

A 26-year-old University of North Carolina student attempted suicide and ended up in a state hospital where he was virtually ignored. He went to the state facility after his insurance company refused to pay for his hospitalization elsewhere. Managed care does not manage mental health well.

Many don't live to tell their story. In 1999, a nine-year-old boy died in a group home as he was being restrained. In 1998, a 16 year-old boy died at a private psychiatric hospital. In August of 2000, a 50-year-old mentally ill man died after being severely burned at a group home in Charlotte.

The cases are not isolated. They are shockingly common. The Charlotte Observer found that 34 people died in the state's mental health system since 1994 and only 10 of those cases were even investigated.

The News and Observer reported that an administrator at the state's main psychiatric hospital, Dorathea Dix, wrote a memo about the hospital's severe staffing shortages a full year before an inspection identified them and put federal funding for the hospital in jeopardy.

Four administrators at Dix were fired that month as political leaders tried to take quick action to make up for years of neglect. It is just not sexy to fight for the mentally ill at the legislature or on the campaign trail.

It is popular to talk about expanding Smart Start, or worker training, but focus groups members' eyes glaze over when you talk about James David Rich, or uninvestigated deaths or bad conditions at state hospitals, or even the death of a 50-year-old man at a group home.

The politicians don't think the public wants to know, and mistakenly think the issue doesn't affect the majority of the people in the state.

That has made it easy for most political leaders to ignore the exploding crisis in a system that affects us all directly, not just the one in five North Carolinians who suffer from a diagnosable mental illness.

The sorry state of our mental health system has consequences for our workplaces, our schools, our prisons, our neighborhoods, and our living rooms. No one seems to want to accept responsibility for the problem, much less take the lead on how to solve it.

It clearly will cost money. There are still too few services provided in many areas, and too little oversight of services that are provided. It will save money too, not just in health care dollars and a more efficient state government, but it will save us millions in prison costs, in training schools, in lost time at work, in fewer bankrupt families.

Providing an efficient, compassionate, comprehensive mental health system would mean starting with no sacred cows, no assumptions, except one. Every person in North Carolina has the right to sound, affordable mental health care. Period. There is another assumption, which is almost as certain.

Despite the pleas of the profit-hungry conserv atives, it is government that must guarantee that right and largely provide the services to ensure it.

The massive problems with the current system lead some to ren ew their attacks on government, particularly at the state level, as the problem. Many progressives have also joined the chorus of anti-government rhetoric, at least on this issue.

And it is irrefutable that state government deserves much of the blame for the current mess that leaves so many mentally ill people underserved or improperly treated.

But the system is so complex, and the funding so complicated, that state government must be ultimately responsible and must direct a new streamlined mental health system. The fact that politicians have allowed the state to shirk its responsibilities until now, does not mean that citizens should.

Private enterprise and its profit motives are not the answer. No one will compete to treat the poor, severely mentally ill patients. They are our responsibility and many of those suffering can be helped with medication, intensive treatment, well-staffed community homes and modern hospitals.

Every year business groups fight efforts to require insurance policies to treat mental illness like every other illness. The so-called mental health parity legislation provokes cries of wolf from business lobbyists including the bizarre claim made last year that they will be forced to spend thousands of dollars treating employees who are just feeling a little dizzy.

The theme of this issue is really the call for more money, better spent; more people, better served. That's a hard sell after five years of a tax-cutting frenzy that has left the state facing a budget crisis. But people are mentally ill in North Carolina, budget crisis or not, tax cuts or tax hikes, election year or legislative year. Many of those people are desperate for help and can't even ask for it. That's why we elect people to serve us, to make tough decisions that are in all of our best interests.

The theme of this issue might also be a plea for more political courage; more lobbying and more political contributions ignored, more lives saved.